Russia Leaves the War

Russia Leaves the War covers four months that set the pattern for the twentieth century: November 1917 to March 1918, from the Bolshevik seizure of power to the Treaty of Brest Litovsk that took Russia out of the First World War. George F. Kennan tells the story from inside the American embassy in Petrograd, where a handful of diplomats, spies, and freelancers improvised policy toward a revolutionary government their own country refused to recognize. The cast is unforgettable: Ambassador David Francis with his portable spittoon, the Red Cross colonel Raymond Robins conducting his own diplomacy with Trotsky, and the professionals watching Washington misread everything. Kennan's subject is the anatomy of misunderstanding, how two future superpowers, at the very first moment of contact, talked past each other, and how American hopes of keeping Russia in the war against Germany came to nothing. Kennan was uniquely placed to write it. The author of the containment doctrine, the diplomat whose Long Telegram had defined American policy toward the Soviet Union, had left government for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and turned historian, and he wrote with an insider's knowledge of how embassies actually work and a stylist's command of irony and scene. The book is the first of two volumes on Soviet American relations from 1917 to 1920, followed by The Decision to Intervene. Its sweep of prizes tells its own story: the 1957 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes besides, one of the most decorated works of history of its decade.